Why It's Becoming Harder to Hate America

Three decades ago, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood gave a famous lecture to an American audience about Canadian-American relations. It remains, to this day, the most precise articulation of Canadians' unbearably smug sense of superiority ever offered. In it, she addresses her childhood in northern Quebec in the 1950s.

My attitude towards Americans was formed by this environment. Alas, the Americans we encountered were usually pictures of ineptitude. We once met two of them dragging a heaving metal boat, plus the motor, across the portage from one lake to another because they did not want to paddle. Typically American, we thought, as they ricocheted off yet another tree. Americans hooked other people when they tried to cast, got lost in the woods and didn't burn their garbage.

For forty years, making fun of Americans, or just quietly judging them, has been a national pastime in Canada. Look at those fat Americans, with their guns, their lunatic religions, their stupid wars. God, we're so much better than them, with our free health care and our infinite water supply. And it was all good fun while it lasted. But recently, the Canadian sense of moral superiority has collapsed in spectacular fashion — so much so that when American scandals explode, like the Edward Snowden affair, we're no longer in any position to judge.

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Why? Well, it's hard to judge anyone when your mayor is caught smoking crack and hardly sees so much as a dip at the polls, as with Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. But the country is full of such sordid scandals. As of a month ago, seemingly every level of government in the country had at least one scandal profound enough to warrant police investigation. The prime minister's chief of staff was caught bribing a Canadian senator. In Montreal, the mayor elected to root out the city's Mafia connections was himself arrested on corruption charges. A different mayor, Gilles Vaillancourt, of Laval, Quebec, was arrested in May for "gangsterism." A city councilor in Alberta was arrested for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Such fusions of political and criminal enterprises have become par for the course here.

It's not just the scandals, though. For most of my life, Americans have been the rich assholes, while Canadians have been the poorer, more virtuous cousins. Those positions are now reversed. Canadians are on average richer than Americans, and also with less concerned with how they make money. At least Obama acknowledges the reality of global climate change: Our government does whatever it can to pretend the issue doesn't exist. The Keystone XL pipeline may or may not happen (Obama's recent speech on the subject was impossibly vague), but the bitumen in the oil sands will be sold, environmental consequences be damned. If it doesn't go south, it will go east. Selling dirty oil to China is about as far as one can get from Atwood's vision of canoeing in northern Quebec.

This is how dark things are in Canada right now: The Canadian government has banned any scientist with state support from speaking to the media on pain of losing their funding. It stopped the census for reasons it could never explain. I for one would much rather have a government gathering information it shouldn't be gathering than the one that I have, which does whatever it can to prevent information from being made public. I also wish that Canada had citizens like Edward Snowden — people who put their lives on the line to try to cure their country of abuses. Canada's culture of silence and open secrecy is swallowing our politics. Even the story of Mayor Ford had to be broken by Gawker.

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From the outside, America, even in the way it spies on its citizens, looks amazingly open. Snowden himself is about to learn this lesson. There are two kinds of American parochialism: one that thinks America is the best country in the world and one that thinks it's the worst. As I write this, Snowden is trying to get out of Russia. You think Putin cares about "privacy"? He doesn't care about your right not to be tortured to death. We should all keep in mind the rule coined by Michael Moynihan at The Daily Beast: If you're living in a country where you can buy a copy of 1984, you aren't living in 1984.

Next month, A.A. Gill's To America with Love will be published in the United States for the first time. In it, the British writer offers a passionate attack against the European brand of anti-Americanism, the elder relative of the Canadian version:

Enough. Enough, enough, enough of this convivial rant, this collectively confirming bigotry. The nasty laugh of little togetherness, or Euro-liberal insecurity. It's embarrassing, infectious, and belittling. Look at that European snapshot of America. It is so unlike the country I have known for 30 years. Not just a caricature but a travesty, an invention. Even on the most cursory observation, the intellectual European view of the New World is a homemade, Old World effigy that suits some internal purpose.

I think the kind of stupidity Gill describes is starting to go away, at least up here. It's unfortunate, because I wish Canadians could still be smug bastards about our neighbors, I really do. But one of the advantages of losing your sense of moral superiority is gaining a better grip on reality. The truth is, we were never that good, and America was never that bad. And by now, anyway, the difference is gone.

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